An MD5 Implementation for Silverlight

Posted by Abel Avram on Jan 29, 2009

Sections

Architecture & Design,

Development

Topics

Silverlight ,

.NET ,

Rich Internet Apps ,

Programming ,

Security ,

SSL

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An implementation of the MD5 cryptographic hashing algorithm for Silverlight has been posted on MSDN by Reid Borsuk. Delay, another MSDN user, has recently posted ComputeFileHashes, a small .NET command-line application that also works on WPF and Silverlight and is helpful to compute MD5, SHA-1, and CRC-32 hashes.

Reid has released the source of an MD5 implementation which can be used by any Silverlight 2 application under Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL). He warns about MD5 as considered insecure and suggest using SHA2.

Delay’s first version was a command-line application which verified the files checksums using MD5, CRC-32, or SHA-1. He released a subsequent version which can process many files and can be integrated with WPF and Silverlight. The binaries and source code were also released under Ms-PL and can be deployed using ClickOnce.

The MD5 hash is supported by the common desktop’s .NET, but not by the one Silverlight 2.0 is using. In the later framework, MD5 is defined as an abstract class which can be extended, but its implementation is not trivial.